Just curious: did nobody else hear the "Pyramids were for storing grain" thing growing up?

[muriel_volestrangler]

98. Before this broke, Fred Clark pointed out how Joseph used the famine to confiscate Egyptian land

and set up the Pharaoh as the tyrannical owner of the whole country. It's a story of how a major figure in Jewish mythology was an evil bastard. Just substitute, say, 'Montgomery Burns' for 'Joseph':

Joseph and the Appalling Tyrannical Despot

Here is the part of this story I mean, from Genesis 47, describing how Pharaoh – with Joseph’s vital help – exploits a massive famine to turn his people into landless serfs and debt-slaves:

Now there was no food in all the land, for the famine was very severe. The land of Egypt and the land of Canaan languished because of the famine. Joseph collected all the money to be found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, in exchange for the grain that they bought; and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s house.

When the money from the land of Egypt and from the land of Canaan was spent, all the Egyptians came to Joseph, and said, “Give us food! Why should we die before your eyes? For our money is gone.”

And Joseph answered, “Give me your livestock, and I will give you food in exchange for your livestock, if your money is gone.” So they brought their livestock to Joseph; and Joseph gave them food in exchange for the horses, the flocks, the herds, and the donkeys. That year he supplied them with food in exchange for all their livestock.

When that year was ended, they came to him the following year, and said to him, “We cannot hide from my lord that our money is all spent; and the herds of cattle are my lord’s. There is nothing left in the sight of my lord but our bodies and our lands. Shall we die before your eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land in exchange for food. We with our land will become slaves to Pharaoh; just give us seed, so that we may live and not die, and that the land may not become desolate.”

So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh. All the Egyptians sold their fields, because the famine was severe upon them; and the land became Pharaoh’s. As for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other. … So Joseph made it a statute concerning the land of Egypt, and it stands to this day.

That’s a tale of reprehensible exploitation, oppression and enslavement. It betrays that “something in the soul that cries out for freedom” of which Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, echoing the prophets of the same scriptures that tell us the story of Joseph.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a modern, Western reader would recoil from Joseph’s behavior in this story, but it isn’t simply my own 21st-century, democratic sensibility that is put off by this. The authors and compilers of the rest of the Pentateuch also share my discomfort with this story. Joseph and Pharaoh, the story says, conspired to amass wealth and consolidate power by preying on the hungry. That behavior is condemned and forbidden by each of the other four books of Moses – a prohibition that is frequently grounded in the reminder that “you were once slaves in Egypt.”
...
Ultimately, not wholly satisfied with any of these defenses or even with their cumulative effect, Calvin settles on simply warning his readers not to follow Joseph’s example:

Let those who are too intent on wealth beware lest they should falsely employ Joseph’s example as a pretext: because it is certain that all contracts which are not formed according to the rule of charity are vicious in the sight of God; and that we ought, according to that equity which is inwardly dictated to us by a secret instinct of nature, so to act towards others as we wish to be dealt with ourselves.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/10/23/joseph-and-the-appalling-tyrannical-despot/